Nagging Questions: What About Hungry, Homeless?

'The poor,'' he explained cheerfully, ''are poor because they are improvident. They are,'' he said, shaking his head, ''very poor managers.''

Pleased with the inevitability of his logic, he continued. ''They should not be given anything. Let them learn to manage. Let them take a job, any job.''

I stopped listening and watched the nods travel around the circle, each person there remembering a terrible job he or she had survived and been the better for it. All over the United States, clean-cut, intelligent people are tsk-tsking the poor. Free enterprise, they say, they demonstrate, works.

It's true, it does work. I lived in Colombia for 10 years. That was more than enough time to see how little opportunity there was in that country for any man to work up out of the slot birth had dropped him into. Women's chances were even fewer.

Chance is what the United States is all about. It's the best thing we've got. But it must not be the only thing.

To start, average middle-class America doesn't accept that we have here in this country, even in this city of Orlando, poor people. Maybe we don't have slums the equal of New Delhi or Mexico City, but there are hungry people even here; there are homeless people, even with children; there are on the streets handicapped people who could not possibly hold a job. Some would say that they deserve to live as they do. Doesn't the government do plenty? Aren't there pages and pages of want ads in the newspaper?

These questions come from memories of the days of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations when the government had decided to split the American pie more equitably. Whether programs begun by the Great Society were right or wrong is not the question. They were buried, digit by digit, unceremoniously, over the past 20 years. Still the memory of that largesse, if only a spirit, remains.

And we all know there are jobs, even for the unskilled. But getting the hard-core unemployed into the mainstream of bathed, groomed, uniformed service employees is quite a task. Then there is child care, and paying for it, and paying for transportation, all on minimum wage. And who will hire the mentally handicapped who wander the streets?

It is too easy to apply private theories to public policy. Many of us squandered our allowances and suffered the consequence. We taught the same hard lesson to our children; we learned. The question is, however, whether we can allow human beings to suffer consequences so severe as malnutrition and exposure to the elements.

Obviously many people are improvident. We all have seen them at the grocery store with a cart full of junk food. Not surprising, they have no money left for milk, oranges, socks and books. The improvidence of the parents is visited on the growing bodies, minds and spirits of the children.

Perhaps the able-bodied men deserve to be left to their ignorant ruts. And maybe the mothers are shiftless -- but what about the dirty little kids sleeping in the back of the car piled high with old clothes, dirty blankets and Coke cans? Should be retarded be at the mercy of criminals as well as the freezing winds? What are they learning on the street in America? What about their chance?